Read Neanderthals and was like wut?
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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They burned the church? Was there Norwegian tourists there?
Out with the old, in with the new?
For a while I lived in The Netherlands and in my experience they're complete total nutters when it comes to fireworks in New Year with tons of people throwing their own fireworks, even more than other countries were doing so is legal and which have similar traditions, such as the UK in Bonfire Night.
I keenly remember this one New Year when the fireworks was so crazy that at the end of it my quiet family neighborhood had become enveloped in a very thick fog that smelled heavily of burnt gunpowder.
So this does not surprise me at all.
I've heard of people not being able to find their own home back in their own street due to the smoke
Yeah and I loved it when I was young. We'd always to try not annoy others too much, not to scare animals etc. And great to meet people, the only time the Dutch are a little sociable. I don't live there now but something seems to have changed in recent years, or maybe it's because I'm not from a big city
Oh, I liked it too - if there's one thing that good be nuts about is fireworks ;)
Also agree with the difficulty of socializing with the Dutch, especially as an immigrant who didn't grew up there with a group of friends. Looking back, almost the entirety of my circle of friends in The Netherlands were other immigrants.
No idea how things are nowadays since I've left the country almost 2 decades ago.
You should visit Stockholm, it's pretty much like this.
I celebrated New Years in Amsterdam back in 2016. It was an absolute shitshow, and the streets felt like a warzone compared to what I'm used to in Copenhagen. This really doesn't surprise me the least.
It was a shit show. But on the upside, a church burned down.
IIRC, it wasn't a church anymore.
It still had the cult vibes though
A 32-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman from Germany were arrested at a party centre in Beverwijk for firing guns into the air shortly after midnight. Other partygoers alerted the police.
That's the weirdest.
weirdest
Attacking public services. (Medics, police, fireman etc) BY FAR!!
They are out there instead of being with their loved ones for us. WHY attack them? Those morons must be punished to the absolute max.
I saw a lot of spent bullets in the streets after NYE in Berlin. Must be a German tradition
That's crazy, I thought Europe didn't have a gun problem...
Most of those shells, if not all, we're most likely blanks. You can get a license to own a gun and blanks very easy in Germany
I see. At least they weren't firing live rounds into the air. That would be dangerous...
They have plenty of guns, they just don't go around murdering the fuck out of each other.
I wonder if they were originally from somewhere around the middle east, like perhaps Turkey? Firing guns into the air during festivities seems commonplace there.
I feel ashamed. That's not celebrating, it's riot for the sake of riots.
Lookup "carbid schieten" If a Policecar comes by, the 2 Policemen get out and face the crowd ......... they get a cup of hot coffee and a warm oliebol. They say "be carefull now you lot! Thanks for the coffee" and drive off. That is celebration in the (east and north) netherlands.
Agreed, this is just embarrassing to read about. Some Florida Man shit.
There have been those kind of celebrations (with or without carbid schieten) all across the country, just like there are warzones all over te country. I don't think we can allow the police to behave like that everywhere.
I don't think we can allow the police to behave like that
That's 100% up to the people how they (can) behave
Totally agree and totally why i said that. Worth working towards a world the police can be like that and everything is fine and nobody gets hurt.
Only works in less populated regions with cohesion and certainly not in cities.
As predicted. If only the cowardly government we still have would have had the balls to outlaw firework sales a year earlier, we wouldn't have had this "final blowout" and things would have been less bad. Still not good though, the culture around new years day has been insane for a while now.
No. If you blame this on the government, you are part of the problem.
The only ones who are to.blame are these Neanderthals that don't have any common sense or descency.
Anyone wigh half a brain knows its not right to behave like this. If you need the government to explain you this, then someone did not raise you well. (And with you, in this case i mean whomever behaves like this, not the person i replied to).
Obviously fuckheads are responsible for their own degenerate behaviour. But there's a lot more to this then just some random fuckheads being fuckheads. The reason this night was worse than any other we've had in history was because the perfect circumstances were created for maximum fuckery. And those circumstances were created by our government. They were warned countless times by many different groups that this was the worst possible way to go about doing things and they stuck their heads in the sand and did it anyway.
The whole existence of fuckheads is one of the reasons we have a government in the first place. It's their job to keep our society functioning as best as possible even though fuckheads exists. And they definitely failed to do their job this time.
This seems like some Florida or Texas shit, but I've not heard of major incidents in a while. What is the New Years culture there?
Fireworks are only legal on new years eve over here. And there are a few countries in the EU where insanely powerful explosives are also legal (basically hand grenades), so they very easily find their way into our country, even though they're not legal here. The police do what they can but it's impossible to make more than a dent.
Fireworks used to be a fun way to have a great party. But as they got harder and louder, and the country got more and more densely populated, the problems also started to pile up. So the tone slowly shifted from a big party, to a rowdy night, to eventually a largely lawless night where it's more and more outright vandalism and rioting, instead of having a party. The past years it's been "normal" to have several deaths, thousands of wounded and scores of cars, houses and other buildings (from bus stops to supermarkets) burned down on new years eve. So even though the Dutch as a people are very resistant to changing their culture, the call to outlaw all fireworks got larger and larger. So large that even the last right-wing parties gave up their resistance last year and admitted that the only way forward was to do away with it altogether. But instead of banning it immediately they wussed out and said they would ban it after one more year with fireworks, even though everyone in law enforcement, the fire departments and medics begged them not to.
So naturally, everyone wanted to go out with a bang, and they basically succeeded. At half past midnight every mobile in the country got an emergency text to only call 112 (our version of 911) in life-threatening situations, since they were completely overwhelmed. Even though they doubled their normal capacity and every policeman, fireman and medic in the country was working as hard as they could to keep things under control. In my opinion political heads should roll for this but it seems the general opinion is to shrug your shoulders and keep on keeping on. Ironically the rest of the year the Netherlands is a very tame country, with less than 100 murders a year in the entire country for example. It's just this single night that got completely out of control.
Fireworks used to be a fun way to have a great party. But as they got harder and louder, and the country got more and more densely populated, the problems also started to pile up.
I was watching the fireworks this year and really thought, I'm actually gonna miss this. But only the actual pretty visual fireworks. If someone buys cobras (or dumb shit like them) they're the primary reason all of this got banned, and I hate them for it.
Yeah, this kind of thing sucks. Everyone has to be worse off because a few shitheads can't contain themselves.
I didn't get a text, but then I live in a not-so-densely populated area..
Wow, thank you. That makes sense
I spent a new years eve in Amsterdam with friends many years ago and I remember it being quite wild. And they fired these huge firecracker strings also in the days leading up to it, like 180cm long...
FUCK YEAH WOOOOOOOO PARTY TIMR
still not going to be enough to do something about this fucking firework plague, though
They literally already made a law to ban it for next time.
I doubt it's going to change much. Most of them buy their fireworks in German supermarkets near the border anyways, and nothing will stop them from doing so in the future.
Germany also banned fireworks in 2020 and 2021 and it only resulted in people importing much more dangerous fireworks from Poland and Czechia.
Unless they get banned in every EU country, or borders get closed, this will only stop the types of people that were using fireworks responsibly in the first place.
I'll believe it when I see it, tbh. This has rolled on for so long, I have no faith that it'll be enforced at all.
Wtf?!